December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Tempest Info [ELECTRICAL NOISE]
by Bill Stewart 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 02:08 PM 5/28/96 -0500, Andrew Loewenstern <andrew_loewenstern(a)il.us.swissbank.com> wrote: >Bill Stewart writes: >> Also, of course, your electrical power system needs to be >> shielded and filtered, so only 60Hz gets through, unless you >> plan to stick to laptops and bring in spare battery packs. >At HoHoCon a few years ago, someone did a tempest demo and mentioned that >signals could be recovered from water pipes! Fire sprinkler systems were >specifically mentioned... Yup. When you're installing a shielded room with waterpipes, it's best to use a chunk of plastic pipe just outside the shieldwall, and you need to make sure the plumbers use teflon tape instead of pipe dope ( unless it was the other way around; it's been a while.) >Theres a lot of different avenues for your eminations to be recovered, some >you may not have thought of. Like crypto, tempest is economics. And like crypto, there are lots of diddly little things you've got to check to make sure you've done _all_ of them correctly. Unlike crypto, however, it's generally easy to find out if you've made a mistake; big mistakes peg your test meter, little ones require you to wave the meter around everywhere and watch for little motions. Also unlike crypto, little mistakes generally won't lose the whole game for you; if somebody's got to watch for six months to accumulate enough leaked electrons to find out the Secret Plans, and you haven't noticed the black van with all the antennas parked out in your parking lot by then, you've got far more serious troubles than just a few stray electrons :-) You may also notice that you can't park your black antenna-van too near the Pentagon. It's not just because they think you're hauling fertilizer; electromagnetic emanations follow this nice square-law that means that a few hundred meters of extra distance makes it _much_ harder to detect the signal you're looking for, as well as mushing it together with all the other stray signals from the building. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts(a)ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 # goodtimes signature virus innoculation

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Re: Clipper III analysis
by tcmay＠got.net 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:37 AM 5/29/96, Bill Frantz wrote: >Carl is right. They want to GAK all keys including signature keys. Now >think, to whom in your life are you willing to grant unlimited power of >attorney? Your spouse? Your lawyer? Your banker? Your employer? Your >government? > >Giving away your signature key is worse. Not only can any key holder act >FOR you, he can act AS you. "We've got you cold perp. You signed this >child porn that was posted to alt.binary.etc. You can make your calls from >jail." Who needs entrapment. But, though things have gotten pretty bad these last 40 years, there are still courts, expert witnesses, and standards for signature verification. Experts are called upon to give testimony about the likelihood that a signature is that of the person claimed (by one side or the other). Though there have been few tests of digital signatures that I know of (I think Utah has a law...), this government access to identities (GAI) will throw a spanner in efforts to get digital signatures widely accepted. Once it gets shown in open court that Joe Blow can claim he did not sign a document and the government will have to admit that this is a possibility, and admits that anyone in government with access to the escrowed data base could have done the signing....well, digital signatures will lose much of their value immediately. Inasmuch as unforgeable digital signatures are critical for electronic commerce, a fact even Clinton cannot ignore, I expect this weakness to help sink Clipper III. As Carl noted, Cypherpunk Deep Cover Agent Micali has been doing a good job in planting logic bombs in these schemes...I urge we approve his bonus. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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Re: Clipper III analysis
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 17:37:05 -0700 >From: frantz(a)netcom.com (Bill Frantz) >Subject: Re: Clipper III analysis > They want to GAK all keys including signature keys. Now >think, to whom in your life are you willing to grant unlimited power of >attorney? Your spouse? Your lawyer? Your banker? Your employer? Your >government? Almost. Actually, they mention at one point that they don't want to GAK the signature keys, but it's almost an afterthought. The thing I find peculiar is that they wand GAK through access to private keys in a PKI, ala Micali or Banker's Trust, but the only keys which need to be in a PKI are signature keys -- ones even they admit should not be recovered. Can you spell "empty intersection", boys and girls? :) Mighty clever of the cryptographer who started them down this path. - Carl +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Carl M. Ellison cme(a)acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme | |PGP: E0414C79B5AF36750217BC1A57386478 & 61E2DE7FCB9D7984E9C8048BA63221A2 | | ``Officer, officer, arrest that man! He's whistling a dirty song.'' | +---------------------------------------------- Jean Ellison (aka Mother) -+

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Re: [Fwd: --> CRISIS on USENET -- SIGN THE PROTEST STATEMENT VIA E-MAIL]
by kashi 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 11:52 AM 5/28/96 +0000, you wrote: >This is a post from Jon Noring (noring(a)netcom.com) about the recent >spamming of alt.religion.scientology. I thought he summed the >situation up very well. Why don't we get together an organized spamming of the CoC's servers? Let's give them a taste of their medicine! I bet that we can make their servers crash before they know what him them!

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Re: Philosophy of information ownership
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"bruce(a)aracnet.com" "Bruce Baugh" 28-MAY-1996 18:50:34.36 >A separate problem arises when the government compels the disclosure of >information for one purpose - getting a driver's license, say - and then >turns around and sells it to others. It's much harder to either negotiate a >new contract or go to a competitor when the other party is a government. Quite. A related problem is when the government generates some information attached to you - the most obvious case being a social security number. Should a private company (e.g., a credit bureau) be allowed to make use of such? On the one hand, it would definitely limit companies not to be able to... on the other hand, you were coerced into having that information attached to you. One option is to have multiple possible SSNs for each person, but that gets into the problem of the credit bureaus, etcetera, may not deal with people who use a new SSN. It's their choice... but they're only able to make that choice because of governmental interference. -Allen

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Re: Remailer chain length?
by E. ALLEN SMITH 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

From: IN%"hfinney(a)shell.portal.com" "Hal" 28-MAY-1996 21:35:03.17 >Or better still, run one remailer on the machine, and use it multiple >times in the chain. It seems to me that one remailer on a machine is >better than several because it will allow more mixing of messages. If >two messages enter a machine and later leave, it may be possible to >distinguish them if they went to different remailers and left with >different From: addresses (or other header fields) as a result. If they >had both gone to the same remailer it would be harder to tell them >apart. But you could get a massive amount of mixing of messages, by this logic, simply by having 1 gigantic remailer. It'd have a vast traffic flow and could do a lot of latency, etcetera. But this also means that whoever runs it can trace everything - and whoever breaks into it can trace everything. While multiple remailers on the same machine isn't ideal for this purpose (if root is cracked, they all are cracked), it's better for this aspect than 1 remailer; root can be assumed to be harder to crack than a non-root-account remailer. Moreover, this is assuming one machine, or an interlinked group of machines set up such that there is one root account for all of them; separating the remailers into machines with different roots would help. The rubber-hose attack on the sysadmin is still a problem, though. -Allen

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RSA breaking
by [0m [5m Toth 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

First i want to apologize: I'm french, my english is pretty good, but if there's some things you don't understand, don't hesitate to ask me further explanations. I'm studying computing. I've studied the RSA encription system, i know that PGP is based on RSA and o know that you give full confiance to PGP. As i and another student, have calculated, an RSA public key of a hundred numbers can't be broken with a software by the force method.(You all know that, sorry to say evidences :) ) But, cause there is a but, it can be broken by an hardware system. Gimme the money, i'll break it, a simple algorithm can be "hardwarly programmed" and with very high-tech components, the speed it can have is enough to break an RSA key. It's for me an evidence that your government has already done it, and that your dreams of privacy are maybe a good joke for some bureaucratists of the pentagon. Of course it (would) take a little time, but as soon as they have your key, it's real time for them to decrypt. One constant thing in the RSA code is that it is always faster to find a key than to break it, that's why i suggest that you find a system of russian dolls encryption with PGP that would crypt a message a lot of times. For studying computing, i know that is time to decrypt a message with the key is so small, that even if i am wrong, it won't be a loss to use a multiple encryption. I hope i don't look like a rooky for you, this letter is humblously written. Greetings, salutations.... No one is more vulnerable than the one who thinks he is, and who's wrong.

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Re: Re: RSA breaking
by [0m [5m Toth 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>Yes, RSA can be "broken" if enough computer power is thrown at a small key, > but what you wrote is not proof that PGP is "broken". PGP is completely based on RSA, break RSA, it's breaking PGP at the same time. >What size of key are you talking about? I said a hundred numbers key, but it can be applied on more, course a thousand, even 200 or 300 seems quite impossible in matter of time. >How much hardware? Difficult to evaluate, as long as it is not really my way(it's programming), but it's kite simple to make hardware from algorithms, just with an optimized eratosten crible(it's the name in french, i don't know the translation, but you'll certainly understand). >How much cost? Hard to evaluate, an infinite amount of money(i mean in matter of research) would be enough, sure that only a big lab, or a government can support this, but as soon as built, the breaking box is of no price. >Please back it up with some numbers. For the cost, i can't evaluate, for the time, i'll calculate tonight, and will send results tomorrow. Sincerely yours, Eric PS: Hope not everyone will take my mail as bad as you think to take it, a thousands pardon if i misunderstood(or you), but it's quite hard for me to follow in English, and to explain with full subtility.

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Quantum Logic Gates
by jya＠pipeline.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

As complement to the ONE_two article on the NIST team's latest work on quantum logic gates, we note that Malcolm Browne also reported last August on parallel work at MIT. We have put that article (keyed then as CAT_tal) at our rickety Web site: http://pwp/usa.pipeline.com/~jya/cattal.txt Also, Signal magazine reported on this area of research in its April 1996 issue at: http://www.us.net/signal/CurrentIssue/April/ Quantum-apr.html

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Re: Re: RSA breaking
by [0m [5m Toth 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> System of Russian dolls? What would you suggest? My idea(it is not me that found that) is that tou could have many public keys, when someone want to send you something, he just mail you his(or her) keys, and then you encrypt with the first key, then with the second, etc... This system is used by some anonymous remailers: Each one has a key, you encript your text with the key of the last remailer, then you put your text, the adress of the people tou want the letter to be sent, then encrypt it with the key of the before the last remailer, and put the adress to be sent of the last remailer, etc So your letter is decripted by the first remailer, then sent to the adress found, then the second remailer decrypts it, etc, like an onion. The fact is that you can obtain a very good privacy if you have some keymaker programm. Let suppose you want to send me a crypted text(don't, it's forbidden to crypt in france), you mail to my remailer, that choose 1000(arbitrary number) keys, that send it to you, crypted with your key, you crypt your text the necessary number of times. This way, the message will be maybe uncrypted by someone, but if the key change for each message, someone can't find your key, i insist on this danger, having one key is useless as soon as someone found it. >What kind of system do you think would be needed to crack RSA coded messages? As i said, it is impossible to break an RSA code with softwares, the best attempt was 25 days with ten Crays linked for a key of only 50 numbers. But this can be done as i said before with a simple eratosten crible "translated" into hardware. Sorry electronic is not my way, but for the exemples i saw in class, it is really to the ability of a basic electronician, and they were more complicated than what i am talking about. The best components you have, the faster you'll go, so a governement or a bog private lab can afford this kind of prices.

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